“No, it is not!”
“Joanna.”
“You are proposing to my best friend. I had to be here. I would have come if you had locked me in a cellar, Cassian. You do understand that.”
“I am beginning to.”
The carriage swayed around the corner of Bruton Street. London at half past nine in the morning had a brittle quality, the streets gray with a thin morning damp, the costermongers pulling their carts. He watched a butcher’s boy step around a horse and thought briefly that he would rather be doing anything else thismorning. Cleaning out a chimney. Sitting for a tooth-pulling. Anything.
He had not slept.
He had got back to Langton House past one in the morning, dismissed his valet, and gone straight to his study where he had sat in the dark in his evening dress with a glass of brandy he had not drunk and a number of conversations playing over and over in his head. He had been tired, but also a part of him he did not wish to examine had been pleased which was the most disquieting part of the entire evening.
He had kissed Lady Alice Lockwood in the middle of the Worthington ball and had somehow been unable to stop himself.
That was not true. Hehadstopped himself. He had stopped himself within thirty seconds. He had performed every public motion required of a man who had committed a public scandal, and he had walked out of Worthington House with his sister on his arm and his face set into the proper grim concern. The performance had been adequate. It was not what bothered him.
What bothered him was the fact that he had wanted to do it.
He had wanted to do it, and then he had done it, and then he had spent the whole night discovering that he wanted to do it again, and that was a problem of a kind he had not had since he was twenty-years-old and learning for the first time that wanting things did not make them sensible.
Lady Alice was a hellion.
She was a bad influence on his sister. For the past two years, she had been a thorn in his side, a disturbance to his peace, and he had spent every encounter with her plotting how to remove her from his sister’s company, and now, he was about to ask her father for her hand in marriage on the grounds of a kiss he had given her because he had not been able to bear the thought of her being ruined by someone else.
That was the explanation. Not because he had wanted to kiss her. Not because he had thought about her mouth more than once over the past two years. But because his sister’s reputation was tied to hers, and Lady Alice Lockwood being kissed by a stranger in a public ballroom would have spilled the scandal onto Joanna by association. He had only been doing what duty required.
They hated each other for God’s sake. That was the entire truth of the matter. He had told himself so all night, persistently, in the dark of his study. If some unacknowledged part of him was not quite convinced, he was not ready to listen to it this morning.
He had a proposal to make. That was the only point.
“Cassian.” He turned to find his sister looking at him. “Have you been listening to me at all this morning?”
“No.”
“Cassian, you cannot.”
“I cannot what, Joanna?”
“You cannot just sit there and remain silent. You must tell me what happened, what she said, what you said, why you kissed her, what?—”
“Joanna.”
“What?”
“I have not slept.”
“Neither have I!”
“Then we shall be a quiet pair this morning.”
“Cassian.”
“What?”
“I didn’t know you were interested in her.”
He looked at his sister. She had their father’s red hair, pinned this morning in a coil under a respectable bonnet, and their mother’s steady gray eyes, and she was looking at him with a very serious expression.
